ok typically i'd just take a sudden jump in one of my star scores as a happy/proud moment. however, because most of my videos received a sudden boost in their scores by about 0.03 stars, i can only assume there's a glitch or the star rating system has been altered.

JudgeHolden also noticed this, and now that I look at my videos, the same thing has happened to me. I don't have enough recent views to justify the jump (I've had 5 downloads/previews since the start of the year).

Now that I have a full-time and part-time job (I get to work 7 days a week! WOOOOO~) my time is pretty short, but I'll look into this and see if I can't come up with a cause. I have a few hypotheses right now.

For purposes of calculating star averages, not all of the star ratings on any given video are used. There is a script that is scheduled to run every 4 hours that makes a list of users who give extremely similar ratings to all the videos that they rate, and stores the list in a table. When a new star rating comes in, the star average is recalculated, with those users that rate every video very similarly removed from the calculation.

The problem is, that script that finds who just gives all 3 star ratings (and other cases like that) doesn't actually seem to be running every 4 hours (so far as I can tell). The last time this script actually did anything was on 2013-3-15 at around 9am.

If this script is running relatively infrequently, a sizable number of users could be removed from consideration (or added back to consideration) for calculating video star averages. Combine that with VCA season, and it's plausible to see star scale jumps.

I don't think this explains all the cases, but that's all I can do with my powers.

Was pondering about using weighted mean for star ratings. Give more weight to users that have their ratings spread evenly and less to those that give all threes. Better than regular script for complete removal, I'd say.

Rider4Z wrote:ok typically i'd just take a sudden jump in one of my star scores as a happy/proud moment. however, because most of my videos received a sudden boost in their scores by about 0.03 stars, i can only assume there's a glitch or the star rating system has been altered.

anyone know what's happening with the star scores?

There's no real mystery behind this, since I've been going through and shoring up my archive recently with older video contest winners, including yours. My old archive (which I built up starting in 2007 and refreshed in 2010) died soon after I did a run-through in 2010, so now's the time I'm going through and getting all that I missed (or had collected before the crash).

For all the videos, I gave out anywhere from 3 to 5 stars (and rightly so -- I like all of your videos and so far every other one I've looked at), but I didn't realize that what I did generate that much of a boost.